Cognitive Apprenticeship

This chapter reviews how people learn during apprenticeships , ways of guiding beginners while they engage in authentic situated activity with more experienced people. Apprenticeship practices are found throughout the world both in cultures with formal schooling and in those without. Traditional apprenticeship practices tend to focus on physical and visible activities, but most schooling is directed toward conceptual learning outcomes which are usually not physical and visible – like formulas in mathematics or theories in physics. This chapter extends apprenticeship research to cognitive apprenticeship , and describes apprenticeships that are designed to lead to abstract or conceptual knowledge. These involve scaffolding, metacognitive reflection, problem-based learning, and situated social practices. Effective apprenticeship often involves productive failure , when learners initially develop potential solutions that are wrong but that can be productively guided toward conceptually correct answers.